Enshittification is perfectly crafted to match our times.

It is dismissive, slightly pretentious, sets a scatological word within a scientific frame and turns worthless behaviour into a technological process.

The naming of the freshly coined word of the year made me wonder about the fate of unused words.

Should we also have a yearly burial service for words that have recently died?

One such rarely used word is classy.

It differs from the New Word for 2024 in its construction. It is laudatory, domesticates a word in common use, and lets it stand for itself without prompting.

Its meaning, however, is also ultimately defined by the examples it is used to describe.

• Classy is when Sydney Carton sacrifices his life for his friend in A Tale of Two Cities.
• Classy is when, in ‘the mile race of the century', John Landy stops to help up Ron Clarke.
• Classy is when Weary Dunlop, having tirelessly helped and stood up for ill and injured prisoners of war, forgives his captors.

Classy, of course, is derived from class.

It connotes First Class, and also Upper Class.

It embraces the self-sacrificing, understated, behaviour expected of the Upper Class and attributed to them as typical in books and comics. On Scott's Expedition to the South Pole, for example, Lawrence ‘Titus' Oates steps out ‘for a while' from his tent in order to give his companions a better chance of living.

The association with Class has contributed to the decommissioning of classy.

As journalists focused on the pretensions and hypocrisy of the Upper Classes and on the gap between their representation in popular literature and their behaviour, class became a pejorative word and classy was also tainted.

Whether society is the better for the dethroning of classy and the coronation of enshittification, I leave for you to decide.

It is the nature of Stray Thoughts to conclude with a question: Are there other once popular and now little-used words whose passing you regret?

• Andrew Hamilton SJ is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
• First published in Eureka Street. Published with the writer's permission.

When we hear of children killed unrepentantly, for example, human rights routinely denied, the cooking of the world locked in, and nations entrusting power to wilful children.

How do you deal with such a dark vision?

After the ABC's of self-care have failed us, we may have tried the D's - denial, despair, disengagement, drink, or determined getting on with it. (The last, though commonly written off, is often surprisingly effective).

Some of these approaches involve shutting our eyes, some going around the abyss, some sinking into it, and others marching through it.

Another path is discernment.

It encourages us to stay with the pain of those suffering unjustly and with the recognition of all our own evasions and illusions until we hit the bottom, and there, perhaps find possibility.

It is summed up in a line from a play by Samuel Beckett, the master navigator of despair: ‘I'm still alive. That may come in useful'.

Once we have opened ourselves to bear the weight of the world and have recognised our own posturing and insignificance, we are open to wry laughter and to look for angles.

That kind of discernment, of course, has roots in Christian faith.

It takes us through the tragedy of Jesus' execution that cancelled all hopes invested in him, invites us into the divine comedy of his Resurrection, and offers a path to follow of compassion for Beckett's vagrants.

For Beckett, Christian faith was a step too far. His gift was to explore faith's lack. But his compassionate entry into the depths of human darkness in search of a glimmer of light offers a way for all of us to consider. What do you think?

• Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
• First published in Eureka Street. Republished with the author's permission.

On that day in 1517 Martin Luther may or may not have nailed his 95 Theses on indulgences to the door of the Wittenberg church.

He certainly did send them to the Archbishop of Mainz, thus initiating a movement that became the Protestant Reformation.

When I was a schoolboy, I was sure the Reformation was a disaster.

Without it, England would have remained Catholic, the Church would have been undivided, wars would have been avoided, Europe would have been Catholic, and everyone would have been happier. I grew up in a Catholic world then.

Now, after having taught theology for many years with friends and colleagues from Protestant churches, I wonder what the world would really have been like today if the Reformation had not happened?

Would it really have been a better Church and a better world?

And how, indeed, can we evaluate these enormous historical events?

Violent events such as wars of religion, burnings at stakes, the sacking of churches and the dissolution of monasteries all speak of loss and destruction.

Some of these events would certainly not have happened had the Church remained undivided.

But others may have persisted.

The images of destroyed and alienated monasteries, for example, suggest a violent break with the past.

But the alienation of monasteries began well before the Reformation - even in England Henry VIII embarked on it while he still opposed the Reformers.

It was a pragmatic decision.

Suppressing the monasteries provided finance needed for his wars and strengthened the loyalty of Nobles who were given title to monastic properties.

The closing of monasteries in Protestant territories in Europe was supported by Reformed doctrine and popular zeal, but there, too, it provided rulers with revenue.

The growing power and independence of rulers in their relationship to the Catholic Church at the time suggest that raiding church wealth would at some time proved irresistible to rulers of any stripe.

When the pope suppressed the Jesuits two centuries later it was under pressure from the Catholic kingdoms of Spain, France and Portugal, which took over their schools, churches and other property.

The Religious Wars that followed the Reformation caused terrible suffering in Europe and alienated people from churches.

Religion was certainly the flag under which armies marched.

But the continuing wars between Catholic Spain and France and their incursions into other Catholic regions and into the New World suggest that Rulers would have waged war with equal ferocity in a Catholic world and in their new colonies.

All this suggests that a world without the Reformation might not have been much more peaceful or united.

The deeper question, however, is whether and how the Reformation has shaped our imagination for the better or for the worse.

This is a subjective question, begging to be answered through personal experience.

Regret at the divisions and separation

For many young Catholics of my generation, the legacy of the Reformation certainly contributed to our suspicion of Anglicans, whom we lumped together with Protestants, whose Churches were not real Churches, and whose faith was equally erroneous.

This religious prejudice added spice to sporting competitions with other schools and fed a tribal sense of identity.

It may well have existed anyway, however, between children whose parents were of the English establishment and those born to poor Irish immigrants.

The stories of the wrongs of Ireland and the heroism of Australia's Archbishop Mannix in defending the Catholic Community received attention equal to that given to the Elizabethan martyrs and contributed to the ways many young Catholics saw the world.

Once a Catholic church in Geneva.

Reformation positives

It was only later that the Reformation touched my imagination in positive ways.

A Methodist lady encountered on a parish census impressed me with a rare quality I could only describe as holiness.

Reading Luther's writings, I was moved initially by their fire and by his emphasis on faith and salvation as God's wholly undeserved gift.

On returning to them at a time of self-doubt and discouragement associated with a rules-bound faith, I responded to the depth out of which they were written. His account of the relationship between grace and works may have been wrong, I thought, but he understood the question.

At the same time, I came to appreciate the richness of J S Bach's cantatas and the power of hymns in Protestant worship.

A Methodist colleague compared the depth of the presence of Christ in the Methodist Hymn Book to that of Christ in the Eucharist for Catholics.

In the hymns of the Wesley brothers, I found a richness of Biblical theology, a care for language and a wealth of imagery largely lacking in the popular Catholic repertoire.

Teaching theology in an ecumenical college, too, revealed to me the strength and seriousness of theology that came out of the Reformed tradition.

In my forays into Karl Barth's monumental multi-volume Church Dogmatics, I did not warm to his theological starting point but was deeply impressed by his massive reading, exploration of Scripture and care and passion in argument.

He set a standard of seriousness in reflection on faith, as well as a surprising lightness in the use of daring imagery.

In order to describe the depth at which God shared our human misery in Jesus, for example, he divided his treatment of Jesus into two sections: The Journey of the Son of God into a Far Country, and The Homecoming of the Son of Man. To use the career of the Prodigal Son as the matrix for the Incarnation was breathtaking.

Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother H Richard Niebuhr, too, stimulated my interest in the connections between faith, culture and public life, especially as they affected people who were oppressed and disadvantaged.

My appreciation of the richness of the Reformed tradition was not simply aesthetic or intellectual.

It was mediated by people who took Christian faith seriously and lived it, especially by my fellow teachers and students.

In them, the doctrine, Church organisation, and liturgy that were initially seen from the outside took flesh in persons and communities wrestling with the same challenges that we faced.

The smallness of congregations, once seen as a sign of weakness, for example, was experienced as a strength in reaching out promptly to people in need

The Reformation now stirs in me the mixed response that a bitter divorce within a family might evoke.

Within it is the pity and shame that we should have allowed a relationship to come to this, and regret at the divisions and separation that followed the divorce.

Within the response, too, is admiration and gratitude for the richness and generosity found in families on both sides of the initial divide and the desire for a full reconciliation.

Reformation by its nature is never completed.

• Andrew Hamilton SJ is a writer at Jesuit Social Services (Australia). He taught theology at the United Faculty of Theology for many years, and has contributed widely to theological and religious journals. He has had a long-standing engagement with refugee communities and issues and is consulting editor of Eureka Street where this article originally appeared.
• Republished with permission of the author.

Federal politicians and business leaders have argued the case for a quick ending while claiming the authority of scientists.

Science being science, the relevant questions have been tied to numbers.

They have asked:

• How few cases should there be in the community before leaving lockdown?
• What percentage of the community must be vaccinated before the lifting of restrictions?
• What number of deaths should be tolerated for the gains of opening the economy?
• And when precisely should the opening of Australia take place?

In this drive towards opening Australia, reflective decision making risks being sidelined.

It would insist that science can provide evidence for answering these questions, but cannot itself decide them.

That rests with the community through its leaders.

It would also insist that in answering the questions no simple and partial calculus will work.

Answers must be based on respect for the needs of all people in the community, and especially the most vulnerable.

Before Australia moves from lockdowns to an open community, too, it must ensure that the most vulnerable people will be protected.

Scientists cannot decisively answer these questions about the end of lockdown because they necessarily rely on provisional and changing knowledge about the virus, its behaviour and effects, about the efficacy of measures taken against it, and about the likely behaviour of people as they remain in or are released from lockdown.

Their advice will inevitably be modified as new evidence emerges, for example, of dramatically more contagious and lethal mutations, or of decreased effectiveness of vaccines.

More importantly, the decisions that people and their leaders must make are about values and only secondarily about numbers.

A mixed group of scientists and cabinet members may accept the same numbers and the same projections about the consequences of lifting lockdowns but come to different conclusions about whether it would be wise and right to do so.

Their differences will arise out of different judgments about what is important in society, and ultimately about the basis of human value.

In the debate about responding to coronavirus human value is often defined in crude terms by comparing the value of one human life with another, or the value of one group of people with another.

By comparing the value of people who are elderly with people who are young or in the workforce, for example, some would argue that we should neglect the lives of one group while focusing the life of others. In this kind of analysis, the value of a human life is measured by economic criteria of cost and benefit.

This reasoning is crude because it focuses on one aspect of human reality, that of economic transactions or of age, and makes it decisive in all questions of policy. It ignores the complexity of the human relationships that compose a human life.

It also devalues personal dignity, which is grounded in the conviction that each person is of unique value, and so cannot be used as a means to someone else's end.

Respect for human beings demands recognising that each person must be taken into account and that, because we depend on one another, we are also responsible to one another.

From this it follows that it is impossible to compare the value of one human being with that of another.

When reflecting on social policy, we must consider all the sets of relationships that compose fully human lives, of which economic relationships are only one of many.

The challenge inherent in moving to live with the pandemic is to regard the human life and flourishing of all human beings as precious and to act in a way that sees this flourishing of all, and especially of the most vulnerable, as the responsibility both of the community and of government.

No responsible policy may sacrifice the lives of one group in order to protect the life or goods of others.

Good policy will begin by reflecting on the risk to people's lives and relationships posed both by the spread of the coronavirus and by the restrictions imposed in order to prevent it.

Both entail considerable loss in terms of physical and mental health, personal and economic relationships and community services.

Without planning and intervention the risk and cost will befall most heavily on the most vulnerable people in society.

In moving from a restricted to an open life the personal and social costs and benefits of the change to all groups in society must be weighed.

Because the transition is now seen to depend on the level of vaccination, the most vulnerable people will be those who are not vaccinated.

They will be most at risk of being infected, becoming seriously ill, and of spreading infection.

This suggests that the proportion of people fully vaccinated before opening the economy must be at the higher rather than lower level of estimation, and should be as high in vulnerable sections of the community as in the better resourced.

Those particularly vulnerable both to the virus and to lack of vaccination are people who are aged, homeless, unemployed and casual workers particularly in rural areas, immigrants, and those confined in prisons, detention centres, nursing homes and other institutions.

The nurses, officers, security, cleaning and cooking staff working in those institutions are also vulnerable, especially if they are forced to work in more than one casual job to support themselves.

Children will be particularly important.

They are vulnerable by reason of age.

They are also most likely to infect other children and their parents, and so to compromise efforts to keep infection out of institutions that house vulnerable adults.

Because of the interlocking relationships in which all human lives are set, the different groups of vulnerable people cannot be totally isolated from one another.

If children spread the virus through families, it will pass further through employment into institutions, and so on to hospitals and health staff, so posing severe pressures on health services to serve increasing demands from unvaccinated patients.

These things do not argue against loosening restrictions on movement, commerce and gathering.

The effects of the restrictions on people's health and livelihood make a powerful case for such loosening. But they do press for spending time and money on preparing for it.

A higher rate of vaccinations in order to reduce the number of people vulnerable to acute illness and death, communication specifically at persuading people in vulnerable groups to be vaccinated, planning to provide accommodation promptly for all homeless people, strengthening stretched health systems, vaccinating for young children who otherwise will spread disease, and ensuring that people held in prisons, homes for the aged and other institutions do not merely avoid death but have a fully human and social life, are just some of the actions required.

Caring for these things is the stuff of good government.

Trust in it is lacking.

Indeed political comment on the haste to move out of constrictions suggests that it is controlled by the timetable for the coming federal election.

That inference may be unfair but it underlines the need to resist haste in moving before due preparations are made.

We should learn from the experience of many nations that have opened up prematurely only to be forced to lock down as numbers of infections and deaths rise and medical resources cannot cope.

In their relationships with the virus neither partisan political imperatives nor public impatience enjoy sovereign power.

• Andrew Hamilton SJ is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
• First published in Eureka Street. Republished with permission.